Staff focus
Dr Joshua Jowitt
Josh is a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle Law School, where he has worked since 2016. He is originally from Barnsley in South Yorkshire, and was the first in his family to go to University – something he decided to pursue after attending a Sutton Trust Summer School in 2005. He studied law at Cambridge and Warwick before moving to the North East to undertake his PhD at Durham in 2013. At Newcastle Josh leads modules in Law and Ethics and Animal Rights Law, and contributes to the Legal Theory module. He is also the Law School’s Director of Undergraduate Admissions. He is a fan of potatoes, cricket, and is a long-suffering fan of Barnsley FC.
Josh is a legal theorist, and works in contemporary secular natural law theory. His PhD won the European Award for Legal Theory for its exceptional contribution to Jurisprudence, and was published as Agency, Morality and Law in 2023. The book has received significant attention including reviews in both Jurisprudence and the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and was the subject of a symposium at the Edinburgh Legal Theory Festival in June 2024. He is currently working on a Thomist critique of Common Good Constitutionalism, an account he first explored at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome in 2023 and will present to the Irish Jurisprudence Society in Dublin later this year. He is also co-producing an edited collection with Dr Alex Green (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Dr Sahar Shah (University of Bristol), the purpose of which is to bridge the gap which has emerged between analytical and critical legal theory. This is currently under contract with Routledge and will be Dialogues in Jurisprudence in 2026.
He also works on legal status – how the law categorises aspects of the world as legal persons, who can bear legal rights, or property that cannot – and uses case studies including nonhuman animals, artificial intelligence and emerging medical technologies. His work on this topic has led him to visiting research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany; the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law; and, most recently, as an AHRC Fellow at the Kluge Centre within the Library of Congress in Washington DC. He has also given qualifying sessions on this topic in his role as an Academic Fellow of the Middle Temple, and is a member of the Nuffield Council for Bioethics’ neural organoid working group. He would like his next book project to use his secular natural law method to develop a new theoretical account of legal status, an idea he recently presented to the Agency in Law research group at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
